An Overview of Major Theories of Labour Market Mismatch

Michael Hopkins

Chapter 2 in Labour Market Planning Revisited, 2002, pp 25-55 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Manpower planning has, at its core, the problem of mismatch between labour supply and demand, that is unemployment. Consequently, a better understanding of the manpower planning problem can be gained by examining theories about the determination of unemployment. Therefore, this chapter overviews some of the leading strands of thought that have attempted to explain, among other things, the economic causes of unemployment. This is an ambitious undertaking since the field is vast and, therefore, the approach taken has been eclectic and does not pretend to be exhaustive. The main choice has been to include those theories, and theoreticians, that have focussed upon unemployment rather than economic theory per se. So, Marx, Keynes and Lewis are included while, for instance, Sen, who focussed mainly on poverty and entitlements, Myrdal, of Asian Drama fame, and Tinbergen, who focussed upon Computerized General Equilibrium (CGE) models, are not. Moreover, the discourse has been hampered because economists rarely agree among themselves on what is the most appropriate theory. For example, in a discussion on the Nobel prize winners for economics, Little2 stated:

Keywords: Labour Market; Labour Supply; Wage Rate; Real Wage; Informal Sector (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-4039-2026-3_2

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9781403920263

DOI: 10.1057/9781403920263_2

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().